Intelligent Design

Evolutionist: “This Picture Has Creationists Terrified”

Posted on Author Cornelius HunterComments(8)
Spread the love

Popular evidences for evolution are the DNA comparisons between species and how they align with the expected common descent pattern. Species that are thought to be more closely related on the evolutionary tree have been found to have more similar DNA, and species that are thought to be more distant on the evolutionary tree have been found to have greater differences in their DNA. The DNA comparisons, evolutionists argue, confirm the expected pattern. Indeed, evolutionists often presented such evidence with great confidence. As Christian de Duve once triumphantly declared: “All [organisms] are descendants of a single ancestral form of life. This fact is now established thanks to the comparative sequencing of proteins and nucleic acids.” But while evolutionists were quick to celebrate these comparisons that confirmed their expectations, contradictory findings slowly but surely arose. Increasingly genome similarities in otherwise distant species, and genome differences in otherwise similar species were discovered. And while evolutionists sometimes tried to explain these uncooperative findings, the evolutionary histories they needed to construct became increasingly complex and circuitous. Today these uncooperative findings have become undeniable and in response evolutionists have all but dropped the common descent prediction, replacing it with a lineage-specific model where evolution is constantly creating new genome features, even between nearest neighbors on the evolutionary tree. What evolutionists have not reckoned with is the implications of this move. If evolution can produce a lineage-specific pattern as well as a common descent pattern, then the comparisons lose their confirmation power. If evolution explains either A or B, then the observation of A, or of B, cannot support evolution very well. Nonetheless evolutionists continue to proclaim those comparisons that align with common descent as powerful and compelling proof texts for evolution. One such comparison is between the chromosomes of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas.  Read more

8 Replies to “Evolutionist: “This Picture Has Creationists Terrified””

  1. 1
    tjguy says:
    February 8, 2014 at 3:22 am

    And this article has Darwinists terrified!

    http://crev.info/2014/02/fitte.....er-arrive/

    From the article:

    A study on mutational possibilities suggests that benefits to fitness are too rare to account for evolution.

    At the end of the paper, they state:

    When Hugo de Vries was advocating for the importance of mutations in evolution, he famously said “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest”. Here we argue that the fittest may never arrive. Instead evolutionary dynamics can be dominated by the “arrival of the frequent”.

  2. 2
    tjguy says:
    February 8, 2014 at 3:22 am

    And this article has Darwinists terrified!

    http://crev.info/2014/02/fitte.....er-arrive/

    From the article:

    A study on mutational possibilities suggests that benefits to fitness are too rare to account for evolution.

    At the end of the paper, they state:

    When Hugo de Vries was advocating for the importance of mutations in evolution, he famously said “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest”. Here we argue that the fittest may never arrive. Instead evolutionary dynamics can be dominated by the “arrival of the frequent”.

  3. 3
    scordova says:
    February 8, 2014 at 10:30 am

    To be fair, however, the similarity has made many atheists.

    Creationists were first to notice that primates are more similar to humans than trees. We can’t run away from the similarity, but let’s not pretend either that it was the evolutionists who saw the similarity, it was the creationists who saw it first!

    Michael Denton related that when he was a medical student in the dissection room, the similarity between the primates and humans was overpowering, he became an atheist for a season because of that experience. Others, like a commenter PasserBy11 have said the same thing.

    Running away from the similarity and trying to de-emphasize it will catch a young creationist off guard, and he will think to himself, “I’ve been lied to.”

    I take the similarity as a message from God. When God wanted to humble Nebuchadnezzar, he made him behave like an animal for several years. Were it not for God’s grace, we’re only slightly above other primates, but instead he has lent us faculties that enable us to build spaceships and do other incredible things.

    The physiological similarities are replete gross morphology, but that said, the genomic differences seem to be more extensive the more we study them and the brain differences, quite different in certain dimensions.

  4. 4
    bornagain77 says:
    February 8, 2014 at 11:26 am

    Dr. Hunter, unless you know something I don’t, the Chromosome 2 fusion argument has been decisively debunked to the best of my knowledge:

    Human Chromosome Fusion Debunked – Jeffrey P. Tomkins – Oct. 26, 2013
    http://designed-dna.org/blog/f.....c29-86.php

    Why The Chromosomal Fusion Argument Doesn’t Wash – Jonathan M – February 2011
    http://www.uncommondescent.com.....esnt-wash/

    It’s Cherry Picking Season – July 24, 2012
    Excerpt (Guy walks into a bar and thinks he is a chimp): I try to outline all the functions of telomeric repeats, but my friend tells me that I am getting off the subject.
    He wants to me to focus on the ITSs, the tracks of the hexamer TTAGGG that reside within chromosome arms or around the centromere, not at the ends. I tell him that I was just coming to that topic. The story, you see, is that in the lineage leading up (or down, I forget which) to chimps and humans, a fusion of chromosome ends occurred — two telomeres became stuck together, the DNA was stitched together, and now we find the remnants of this event on the inside of chromosomes. And to be fair, I concede at this point that the 2q13 ITS site shared by chimps and humans can be considered a synapomorphy, a five-dollar cladistic term meaning a genetic marker that the two species share. As this is said, it is apparent that the countenance of my acquaintance lightens a bit only to darken a second later. For I follow up by saying that of all the known ITSs, and there are many in the genomes of chimps and humans, as well as mice and rats and cows…, the 2q13 ITS is the only one that can be associated with an evolutionary breakpoint or fusion. The other ITSs, I hasten to add, do not square up with chromosomal breakpoints in primates (Farré M, Ponsà M, Bosch M. 2009, “Interstitial telomeric sequences (ITSs) are not located at the exact evolutionary breakpoints in primates,” Cytogenetic and Genome Research 124(2): 128-131.). In brief, to hone in on the 2q13 ITS as being typical of what we see in the human and chimp genomes seems almost like cherry-picking data. Most are not DNA scars in the way they have been portrayed.
    http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....62491.html

    Moreover, the supposed 98% genetic similarity between Chimps and Humans is now also shown to be fallacious:

    A False Trichotomy
    Excerpt: The common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human Y chromosomes are “horrendously different from each other”, says David Page,,, “It looks like there’s been a dramatic renovation or reinvention of the Y chromosome in the chimpanzee and human lineages.”
    http://www.uncommondescent.com.....richotomy/

    Comprehensive Analysis of Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes Reveals Average DNA Similarity of 70% – by Jeffrey P. Tomkins – February 20, 2013
    Excerpt: For the chimp autosomes, the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76%, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense the chromosomes, the higher the DNA similarity—although there were several notable exceptions defying this trend. Only 69% of the chimpanzee X chromosome was similar to human and only 43% of the Y chromosome. Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While, chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor.
    http://www.answersingenesis.or.....chromosome

    Moreover, as if that was not devastating enough to the 99% similarity myth, a large percentage of completely unique orphan genes (no one really knows the exact percentage difference yet), with no sequence homology whatsoever, are now being found in each new genome that is sequenced, including humans and chimps:

    Genes from nowhere: Orphans with a surprising story – 16 January 2013 – Helen Pilcher
    Excerpt: When biologists began sequencing genomes they discovered up to a third of genes in each species seemed to have no parents or family of any kind. Nevertheless, some of these “orphan genes” are high achievers (are just as essential as ‘old’ genes),,,
    But where do they come from? With no obvious ancestry, it was as if these genes appeared out of nowhere, but that couldn’t be true. Everyone assumed that as we learned more, we would discover what had happened to their families. But we haven’t-quite the opposite, in fact.,,,
    The upshot is that the chances of random mutations turning a bit of junk DNA into a new gene seem infinitesmally small. As the French biologist Francois Jacob wrote 35 years ago, “the probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero”.,,,
    Orphan genes have since been found in every genome sequenced to date, from mosquito to man, roundworm to rat, and their numbers are still growing.
    http://ccsb.dfci.harvard.edu/w.....n_2013.pdf

    Even arch neo-Darwinists Jerry Coyne admits to a large percentage of ORFan genes that are not shared:

    From Jerry Coyne, More Table-Pounding, Hand-Waving – May 2012
    Excerpt: “More than 6 percent of genes found in humans simply aren’t found in any form in chimpanzees. There are over fourteen hundred novel genes expressed in humans but not in chimps.”
    Jerry Coyne – ardent and ‘angry’ neo-Darwinist – professor at the University of Chicago in the department of ecology and evolution for twenty years. He specializes in evolutionary genetics (and inquisition style persecution of anyone who does not toe the Darwinian/Atheistic party line)

    Moreover, the anatomy between chimps and humans is far greater than Darwinists have misled to public to believe. In fact, in the very same paper that started the whole 98% genetic similarity myth, it was noted that anatomical differences between chimps and humans are ‘significant’:

    In “Science,” 1975, M-C King and A.C. Wilson published a paper estimating the degree of similarity between the human and the chimpanzee genome. This documented the degree of similarity between the two! Far more than was thought possible at the time. Hence, we must be one with apes! But…in the second section of their paper King and Wilson describe honestly the deficiencies of such an idea:

    “ The molecular similarity between chimpanzees and humans is extraordinary because they differ far more than sibling species in anatomy and way of life. Although humans and chimpanzees are rather similar in the structure of the thorax and arms, they differ substantially not only in brain size but also in the anatomy of the pelvis, foot, and jaws, as well as in relative lengths of limbs and digits (38).
    Humans and chimpanzees also differ significantly in many other anatomical respects, to the extent that nearly every bone in the body of a chimpanzee is readily distinguishable in shape or size from its human counterpart (38).
    Associated with these anatomical differences there are, of course, major differences in posture (see cover picture), mode of locomotion, methods of procuring food, and means of communication. Because of these major differences in anatomy and way of life, biologists place the two species not just in separate genera but in separate families (39) . So it appears that molecular and organismal methods of evaluating the chimpanzee human difference yield quite different conclusions (40).”
    David Berlinski – The Devil’s Delusion – Page 162
    Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees Mary-Claire King; A. C. Wilson – 1975

    In fact so great are the anatomical differences between humans and chimps found to be that a Darwinist actually proposed that a chimp and pig mated with each other and that is what ultimately gave rise to humans:

    A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans? – July 3, 2013
    Excerpt: Dr. Eugene McCarthy,, has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence and McCarthy does not disappoint. Rather than relying on genetic sequence comparisons, he instead offers extensive anatomical comparisons, each of which may be individually assailable, but startling when taken together.,,,
    The list of anatomical specializations we may have gained from porcine philandering is too long to detail here. Suffice it to say, similarities in the face, skin and organ microstructure alone is hard to explain away. A short list of differential features, for example, would include, multipyramidal kidney structure, presence of dermal melanocytes, melanoma, absence of a primate baculum (penis bone), surface lipid and carbohydrate composition of cell membranes, vocal cord structure, laryngeal sacs, diverticuli of the fetal stomach, intestinal “valves of Kerkring,” heart chamber symmetry, skin and cranial vasculature and method of cooling, and tooth structure. Other features occasionally seen in humans, like bicornuate uteruses and supernumerary nipples, would also be difficult to incorporate into a purely primate tree.
    http://phys.org/news/2013-07-c.....umans.html

    Moreover, due to the extreme controversy that was generated for even questioning such a supposedly well supported theory (i.e. that Humans and chimps are closely related), Physorg published a subsequent article showing that the pig-chimp hybrid theory for human origins is much harder to debunk than Darwinists had at first supposed it would be:

    Human hybrids: a closer look at the theory and evidence – July 25, 2013
    Excerpt: There was considerable fallout, both positive and negative, from our first story covering the radical pig-chimp hybrid theory put forth by Dr. Eugene McCarthy,,,By and large, those coming out against the theory had surprisingly little science to offer in their sometimes personal attacks against McCarthy.
    ,,,Under the alternative hypothesis (humans are not pig-chimp hybrids), the assumption is that humans and chimpanzees are equally distant from pigs. You would therefore expect chimp traits not seen in humans to be present in pigs at about the same rate as are human traits not found in chimps. However, when he searched the literature for traits that distinguish humans and chimps, and compiled a lengthy list of such traits, he found that it was always humans who were similar to pigs with respect to these traits. This finding is inconsistent with the possibility that humans are not pig-chimp hybrids, that is, it rejects that hypothesis.,,,
    http://phys.org/news/2013-07-h.....dence.html

    Thus, as preposterous as the pig/chimp (PIMP) hypothesis was/is, Darwinists were/are unable to decisively refute it because the anatomical differences between humans and chimps is far greater than that between pigs and humans!

  5. 5
    JGuy says:
    February 8, 2014 at 2:51 pm

    Let’s suppose you were an evolutionist. Which of these scenarios would be preferred evidence, and why?:

    (1) The number of chromosome pairs between humans and chimps are equal.

    (2) Humans have one less chromosome pair than chimps, but one of the human pairs is* a fused chromosome pair.

    * Disregarding that it may actually not be a fused chromosome pair as BA77 point out above.

    My answer is this. If I were an evolutionist, I think I would prefer that the case were #1. Why? Because if anything it creates more problems. Now a fusion event needs to be explained in a certain time period.

    Claiming that a prediction was made for a fusion event would be a nice prediction, but I don’t think it would have been unique to common descent. If the morphological and other biochemical similarities are similar enough, one could predict a fusion event – if so desired – on the basis of comparative anatomy alone.

    Another question is this….

    If there is no fusion event. Will this refute common descent, or will evolutionist maintain their position but simply adapt to the evidence and say it was deleted.

    In tune of the old coin flipping adage, the evolutionist says: If fused I win. If deleted you lose.

  6. 6
    JGuy says:
    February 8, 2014 at 2:53 pm

    Edit:”Why? Because if anything it [a fusion event] creates more problems. Now a fusion event needs to be explained in a certain time period.”

  7. 7
    mjazzguitar says:
    February 9, 2014 at 6:45 am

    A study on avian DNA showed that the predators were unrelated to each other and more related to birds like pigeons and doves.

  8. 8
    mk says:
    February 9, 2014 at 7:58 am

    the chromosomal fusion happaned in the human genome(48 fuse into 46) and not apes. so there is no evidence for coomondescent.

Leave a Reply